Archive for August 2011

Hungary’s annual ‘Margaret Island Festival’ is well is known. Less well known is the ‘Hungarian Island Festival‘ (Magyar Sziget Fesztivál), the far right’s version. The Sun managed to infiltrate this festival, in a pretty decent piece of investigative journalism (credit where credit is due, it’s apparently run by some quite scary people). The Sun journalists got chatting to Chris Hurst, a BNP big wig, and managed to catch him performing Nazi salutes and espousing generally offensive views.

Laurent Hamels

This got me thinking, the far-right in Europe has put quite a lot of effort into moderating its image and appearing more mainstream. Does its success depend on its ability to change its image? Or do successful parties change their images because of the increased scrutiny and integration with the system that comes with success? I expect the more successful parties to be those that present a more moderate image. So, I’ve taken four European parties of the far-right, two successful (by the standards of the far-right) ones and two unsuccessful ones, and made a very unscientific examination of the image that they present.

The four parties that I’ll be looking at will be: our BNP, France’s FN (National Front), Germany’s NPD (National Democratic Party) and Hungary’s Jobbik (The movement for a Better Hungary). The BNP and NPD have had very little electoral success, while the FN and Jobbik have both been able to command around 15% of the vote in past elections.

I’ll start with Jobbik, as it’s the most successful of the four parties. It even has an English language website. As well as being slick and well designed it is also very carefully written to practically ooze moderation. It still sounds very conservative, but certainly not like an extremist party. There are only a few bits which make you feel uncomfortable, such as talking about how the Hungarian Guard (a paramilitary organisation) is not a paramilitary organisation because they don’t carry weapons. Their Hungarian manifesto gives a surprisingly similar picture of moderation. The first foreword (by Krisztina Morvai, their nominee for Hungary’s presidency*) talks about economic issues and appeals for non-supporters not to prejudge them. Similarly the second foreword (by Gábor Vona (the party’s leader) talks about issues such as national self-determination. There is no mention of ‘The Gipsy Problem’, which is Hungary’s equivalent to the Western parties’ immigration issue.

The NPD on the other hand… Well I opened up their manifesto and the first item is the Grundgedanken (fundamental ideas). The first two sentences translate as, “in the 21st century the continued existence of the German people will be decided. Threats come from declining birth rates, the rapidly progressing foreign infiltration, heteronomy* caused by international institutions and the devastating consequences of globalisation.” I think little more needs to be said about the image this party tries to project. I remember looking at its website when I was in the sixth form and it had a map of ‘Greater Germany’ on its front page… Its electoral strength matches the extremity of its manifesto. It barely exists outside East Germany and was beaten by the Pirate Party in the 2009 federal elections (to be fair the pirate party did get a whole 2% of the vote).

The FN is the second successful party of the far right that I’m going to look at. They’re less successful than Jobbik, but can still command a significant share of the vote. If you go to their website and look at their manifesto they have everything organised as subject areas with little clickable pictures. Immigration is the first one, but once you actually read the policy, it’s all couched in terms of crime, benefits and loyalty to the French state. Essentially, it would fit right in with the typical Daily Mail article – a load of very conservative crap, but being careful to avoid seeming like an actual racist/extremist.

Finally the BNP. Their manifesto does not even put immigration in the most prominent spot. That privilege goes to crime and justice (corporal punishment, capital punishment, political correctness etc). In the immigration section of their manifesto they seem to go down an interesting road though. Their first statement is that, “the indigenous British people, will become an ethnic minority in our own country…” This is not a good start… They also keep talking about how most immigrants are, “of third world extraction.” I can only assume that this is code for ‘non-white.’ Finally they have a good moan about how Pakistan wouldn’t tolerate, “millions of Hindus or Christians entering that country and changing it from a Muslim society.” The BNP is certainly trying to promote a more mainstream image for itself (as illustrated by its immediate expulsion of the man I mentioned at the beginning of this post), but its manifesto easily puts it at the more extreme end of the European far-right.

All in all, the parties’ positions have matched my prediction. The more successful ones have had much more moderate-sounding policies than the less successful ones. Whether there is a causal link is much harder to say. My own opinion is that as an extremist party grows there is a process of moderation fed by both external and internal pressure. As successes are achieved the party’s leadership start to see the potential to go beyond being a simple protest party and are also forced to acknowledge the harsh reality of electoral politics and the need to build a coalition of supporters. This in turn leads to more people being willing to support the party as it moderates its stance and new relatively moderate members act to drag it further towards the centre. I believe there are more significant factors for explaining the success (or lack thereof) of far-right parties, but there does seem to be an interesting correlation present.

*Only a figurehead position in Hungary, so I’d be interested to know why she got to go first in the manifesto.

**The opposite of autonomy – imposition of foreign laws and rule on your state. Yes I did have to look the word up.

One of the latest government gimmicks is to have e-petitions. If over 100,000 people sign them then the petition’s topic is debated in Parliament. Currently the most popular petition (107,037 signatures at the time of writing) is demanding that convicted rioters should lose all of their benefits. I’m all for cracking down hard on the rioters, but this particular idea is one that I think is both wrong and foolish.

Steve Taylor

Here is the exact wording of the petition:

“Any persons convicted of criminal acts during the current London riots should have all financial benefits removed. No tax payer should have to contribute to those who have destroyed property, stolen from their community and shown a disregard for the country that provides for them.”

There are, in my opinion, at least three good reasons why you should not support this petition.

Retrospective punishment. Any decent system of justice is based on the idea that changes in the law only affect future behaviour. Turning round and changing the law about what people have done in the past is a very dangerous road to go down. Frankly it’s un-British (or at least it should be) to change the law retrospectively.

We don’t take benefits away from people for other crimes. It’s nonsense to say that rioters are worse than other thieves, thugs, rapists and murderers. If you commit a crime you complete your sentence and then your debt to society is paid. Once you’ve done your time that’s it, the police shouldn’t have the right to come round and punish you more because you’re a bad sort and neither should society continue to punish you forever because it feels particularly outraged about this particular crime.

People may well disagree with me on the principles that found the last two points, but my final point is a pragmatic one. If you permanently deprive everyone convicted of rioting of state benefits then you are basically giving them a choice between living on the streets and funding their lives through crime or dying. A homeless person, with a criminal record, who is not permitted to receive any help from the state is going to have no other means of surviving. So, you end up with a situation where you have a significant increase in crime and everything gets more expensive for the taxpayer (I can assure you that keeping someone in prison is more expensive than keeping them on benefits).I also agree with the moral argument against leaving people homeless on the streets, but regardless of human-decency, the massive increase in crime and prison costs seems like much too high a price to pay to satisfy one’s anger at a bunch of thugs. Despite their unacceptability, the riots do show up real problems in society and frankly cutting off people’s benefits is going to do nothing to solve them.

I expect most of the people who read this wouldn’t have signed the petition anyway, but if you were thinking of it then I hope this gives you pause for thought. If you really want to sign a petition anyway, then I would recommend the one on retaining the ban on capital punishment.

The London riots have triggered a lot of debate about dealing with the underclass. Yes we know that rioting is unacceptable behaviour, and that looting and arson is pure criminality, but right now I want to think about how to deal with the wider problem that has been highlighted by these events.

Every Western country has an underclass, although it will vary in size and nature from country to country. These underclasses are expensive, unproductive and occasionally lead to major social upheaval. So, if you were suddenly running your country’s government and had a decent amount of political capital to achieve your policies what would you do?

Tony Weller

The problem in the UK is not one of absolute poverty, members of the underclass are not starving, they have adequate healthcare and housing. This is a situation that makes me happy to some degree. I think that in an extremely rich and ostensibly civilised country it is important to make sure that there is indeed a safety net. So what are the problems?

Here’s what I think:

– Education
– Discipline
– Prospects
– Poverty trap
– Culture

At the risk of sounding like some kind of unholy cross between a Leftwing stooge and a devout Big Society Cameronite (or is that exactly what a Lib Dem is?), I believe both views have partial solutions. I don’t think it’s possible to just talk about the oppression and neglect of society, resulting in their poor behaviour and disillusionment. People need to remember that even the most deprived citizens of this country still live somewhere that provides free education until they are 18, significant state assistance for further education, healthcare, housing, ensures that they do not have to go hungry etc. People have to take some level of responsibility for their own actions, for failing to take advantage of the opportunities that are offered to them. Throwing money at the problem or building more youth clubs might paper things over and prevent rioting, but it still leaves things simmering. Out of sight-out of mind is rarely a good strategy.

However, it also looks pretty clear to me that one can’t just take the self-congratulatory middle-class approach of announcing that these people are just welfare queens who don’t want to work and leach off the good hard-working citizens of this country. Sure, there are routes out of the underclass available for people, but to use them they have to get past a pernicious culture, unhelpful parents and a failing education system. It’s a cop out to announce that if people simply worked hard enough they could escape their situation.

This actually leads into my first point. Working harder. At the moment members of the underclass are surrounded by a culture of not working. Their parents don’t work, their friends and associates’ parents don’t work, their schools don’t expect them to work and our media seems to focus on and promote get-rich-quick methods of advancement. Solutions to these kinds of problems are difficult. However, I would say that schools have to be the key to it all. There is only so much that can be done to make bad parents be better parents, unless you’re willing to go into some seriously authoritarian behaviour (which I’m not). The school system needs to be used to provide higher expectations for deprived students. Many young people (and here I also include the middle classes) have never really been told ‘no’ in a meaningful way. Their parents want to be their friends and the education system is also unable to provide discipline.

So what is needed in education? I don’t want to go into it in too much depth, but my own instinct would be to say better staff and more disciplinary power for schools. One is likely to cost money, the other is a classic conservative policy. The ability of a teacher is the largest factor in the performance of pupils and children need to have limits laid down in their lives, either by their parents or by their schools. If they learn no limits then they’re useless as workers and effectively end up excluded from society. It might also be worth considering some sort of cash incentive for good behaviour, whether a carrot or a stick. But, rather than aiming it at pupils, aim it at parents. Anyway, sorting out inner city education is much too big a topic to deal with in any more detail than this without giving it its own blog post (which I may do).

Prospects are very heavily linked with education as an issue. However, it’s not the only issue, globalisation has seen outsourcing cutting a swathe through many career paths, and in order to have prospects it’s necessary to also have aspirations and ambitions that are achievable. Education makes things achievable, but those ambitions need to be given to people. Schools, parents and society in general need to be making sure that young people have a goal to work towards and that that goal is realistically achievable.

However, I’m not convinced by claims that there are no unskilled jobs available, from my own (admittedly anecdotal) experience in London there are plenty of jobs of these kinds around, and they often seem to be filled by immigrants who can barely speak English. I think there is a problem with British-born people seeing themselves as above minimum wage jobs, which ties neatly into the question of the poverty trap. By that I mean the situation where people choosing to work instead of claim benefits are faced by an extremely high marginal tax rate. In other words, if they choose to work they get very little or no extra money because they lose benefits as fast or faster than their income increases. There are two potential solutions to this. One is to cut benefits, then when people work there’s more to gain. The other is to increase the return from work, whether it’s by keeping benefits for higher incomes or by raising wages/reducing taxes. Being a wishy washy liberal type I prefer the carrot to the stick, but I’m willing to be convinced.

The final issue that I mentioned is culture. Among the underclass there seems to be a pernicious culture of glorifying illegal behaviour and rampant consumerism (which their incomes can’t support). There is a similar consumer culture across the whole of society and this combines with the promotion of get-rich-quick to present an unrealistic picture of how things should be to the young. When large numbers of people see mediastar/footballer as the only desirable career paths then society has a problem. Particularly when the popular image of those people hides the amount of work that one has to put in to actually succeed at them. Sadly, culture is one area that I don’t have many ideas about on the national level. Its sheer momentum and intangibility makes it much harder to change.

I realise that I have breezed over solutions to the problems that I’ve brought up, but I could write essays on each of them individually and this post has already gone over 1000 words, so I would rather leave that for debate and/or later blog posts instead of writing a thesis.